By
the time E. A. Bonine photographed the Akimel O’odham (River People), called
the “Pima” by Spanish and American colonists, Native Americans across the
United States had already been forced onto reservations in huge numbers by the
Indian Appropriations Act of 1851. Before then, assimilation policies had been
in place since the early 1800s with the intention of diminishing Native
American identities and cultural traditions.

This
commercial photograph of Bonine’s satisfied a public interest in the
romanticized past of Native Americans, but it also distanced European Americans
from the real living conditions of contemporary Native Americans. The picture
was staged in a studio against a white sheet and includes a number of props,
such as logs and an overturned clay pot used as a table surface. The props made
Bonine’s subjects appear more “native” than the reality of their reservation
life. Although these images were intended for commercial use, anthropologists
at the time occasionally included the photographs as truthful documents alongside
their own ethnographic images.